Breaking news just in…

Telecom have just announced that they will be voluntarily separating their retail and wholesale businesses. Telecom will be following the lead of BT in the UK and Telstra in Australia although they will still operate both businesses under the same Telecom brand.

Source: Computerworld

More thrilling football!! England beat Ecuador in not one of their best performances, but it still counts. David Beckham was the key – he scored another brilliant goal from a free-kick. Check out this link from the BBC site that displays a shockwave animation of the goal – you can change the camera angles and speed, very cool.

Also, Portugal are through after beating the Dutch in what has to be the dirtiest game in the World Cup so far. 16 yellow cards, 4 red cards, a Figo headbut, and several terrible challenges were the highlights (?) of this game. Portugal now meets England in the next round.

The time difference between NZ and Germany means that I’ve got a few early starts ahead of me for the week ahead. The first games in the knockout round were played this morning so that meant that I was up at 3am to watch Germany beat Sweden 2 – 0, and then watched the cracker of a match that was Argentina versus Mexico. The scores were level after 90 minutes meaning that it was the first game to head into extra time in this World Cup. It only took 8 minutes of extra time for Maxi Rodriguez to score one of the best goals of the tournament – equal (in my opinion) with Joe Cole’s beauty for England. Argentina then managed to hold on for a 2 – 1 victory. That means Argentia will play the hosts, Germany in what will probably be the best out of the quart-finals.

Over the next few days, we’ve got some great games lined up: England v Ecuador, Netherlands v Portugal, Italy v Australia, Brazil v Ghana… That means I’ll be up at 3am for the next few mornings to watch the game. Quite handy though becuase I’ve got my MCSE upgrade exam on Wednesday so I get an extra four hours in the mornings to study!

My essential tools for following the World Cup are:

• The official FIFA World Cup site
• The BBC Sport World Cup site
• The Microsoft World Cup Tracker for Excel
• And this iCal for adding to your Gmail Calendar (or any other iCal compatible software) – this is really cool, the author updates the scores as the games are completed too!

Part of my feed reading this morning lead me to sign up with Yahoo! Mail so that I could test out their new beta mail product. So I signed up with a Yahoo! NZ address of stuart.maxwell@yahoo.co.nz but this didn't allow me to switch over to the new beta. I changed my location to UK, and noticed the link to test out the new Mail beta.

The beta is seriously cool, and makes Windows Live Mail look like the project of a pre-school coder. The interface is the closest to a full desktop application that I've seen for a while (the pre-alpha Roundcube Mail is similar to this too.) Everything is snappy – changing between mail folders, or opening and closing emails all happens quickly with no visible signs of waiting. Compare this to the constant "working on your request" messages you get while using Windows Live Mail (not to mention the "Windows Live Mail wasn't able to complete this request" messages with WLM too!)

There's also a snazzy button that lets you add a contact to your addressbook with one click from an email you've received. This won't make me switch email addresses as I still prefer the simpler, quicker interface you get with Gmail, but this is definitely a big contender for top dog in the email contests. Both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail put Microsoft's effort to shame. Let's hope that Microsoft takes a hard, long look at the competition out there and makes some big changes.    

I've been studying for my next exam (Microsoft's 70-296) so I haven't spent much time reading through FeedDemon recently, so I decided to catch up this morning. I subscribe to 122 different feeds which you can look through here: OPML.

There is a lot of good content out there, as well as a lot of crap (that reminds me, I'm down to 121 feeds now!) Almost all o the feeds that I subscribe to provide full content, the only exception I can think of is the BBC, and I tolerate it because I think the BBC is one of the best general news sources available online.

In my reading this morning, I discovered some new software (Cropper in C#), the Wordpress Themes site, four Wordpress plugins for displaying Flickr albums on your site (I'm still trying to find one that will allow me to include/exclude certain tags), and several reviews on the new webmail apps offered by the big guns (now I'm back up to 122 feeds!). I also found a very cool article on how to script iTunes in vbscript (on a Microsoft site of all places!) – I haven't yet worked out how I'm going to use this yet, but I'm sure I will!

All up, a very productive morning! 

I’ve just posted an in-depth review on the beta @ amanzi site on the new WLMDB (awful name) with lots of screenshots. Read on for more details…

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I’ve put in a couple of big updates to the Blogtown NZ site. I implemented the memcached cacheing daemon and enabled caching using the Wordpress memcached plugin. I also updated to the latest nightly which fixes a lot of the bugs that have been lurking around.

If you’re keen on setting up your Blogtown NZ blog, visit this the site here: http://blogtown.co.nz/wp-signup.php

Several sites are reporting that a Microsoft France site was hacked and defaced. The site is currently down so it appears as though Microsoft have taken it offline to firefight.

A mirror of the defaced site can be found here: zone-h.org.

Big news around the internet at the moment is that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to work for a startup company called PodTech.net. As you can probably tell from the name, PodTech.net are a podcasting or vlogging company. This is a big loss to Microsoft as Scoble put a human face to the massive corporation. I’ve linked to several of his posts before as he was never afraid to say what he was thinking whether it was for or against Microsoft.

Links:

• Correcting the Record about Microsoft
• PodTech.net

The Fifa World Cup 2006 has just started and it meant an early morning for us down in New Zealand. I was up at 3am to watch the opening ceremony, the highlight of which was seeing the all-time greats all together in one place.

Germany and Costa Rica have just started playing the opening game and six minutes into the game, Philipp Lahm from Germany scored a cracker to open the scoring!

12th minute: Costa Rica have just scored the equalizer. Germany were calling for an offside, but replays show that Paulo Wanchope was onside before making the break and scoring the goal.

17th minute: Germany have just taken the lead back with another great goal, this time from Miroslav Klose who finished off a flat, square cross in front of the goal.

This is turning into one of the classics – back to watching the game now!